


Drowned In Evening Light

by bbcsherlockian



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Character Death, I promise!, M/M, Retirementlock, it will live up to its explicit rating
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-19
Updated: 2014-08-31
Packaged: 2018-02-09 13:08:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1984143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbcsherlockian/pseuds/bbcsherlockian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Watson's final memoirs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

Sherlock,

I don’t particularly know how to start this, so I’ll suppose I’ll just start here. I’ve always been a storyteller for the one, great Sherlock Holmes, but I think this is the most important story I’ve ever told. Our story. 

At first, I considered starting right at the very, very beginning, all the way back in 2010 when I lent you my phone and you lent me your heart. But in reflection, I think my blog has immortalised those years quite well, don’t you think? There’s not much point in repeating myself. I’m not even sure how much time I’ll have to complete this, but no matter.

I feel, therefore, it’s only fair that these last eight-or-so years are recorded too, perhaps before I get too old to remember them to any significant degree of detail, or perhaps because paper tends to remember far longer than any human being could. 

It should be clarified: I didn’t write this for anyone to read other than myself, and if anyone does stumble across this-- Well. I just hope you have the good sense not to publish it. The thing is, you see, I just couldn’t let everything die. Not everything. That would be too cruel. 

Now, I always think it’s odd that while something is happening it doesn’t go particularly quickly, but when you step back and remove yourself from the picture nearly thirty years seemed to have occurred in a mere breath. Of course, I can’t remember everything, and with some of the events recorded here, I did allow myself a touch of artistic license. It’s mostly true though, and my god, we were fantastic. When we were, at least.

So here’s to us.

Your beloved,

John


	2. August, 2029

“And here, here our bed would fit perfectly in this corner.”

“We’ll have to buy a new bed.”

“Our bed is perfectly fine!”

“Sherlock, it’s over twenty years old! We need a new bed.”

“Fine. As long as I get to be in it with you.”

Two men, standing among shafts of sunlight, dust motes around their feet. Bringing something untouched, something old to life. Writing just another chapter, filling it with furniture. 

This was us, once. 

Sherlock’s parents had left the little cottage in Sussex to him, and he - unsurprisingly - had neglected to mention this to me until he announced completely unprecedented - one fine day in June - that he was going to retire. And that, of course, I should retire alongside him. 

“You’re only fifty two!” I had argued. Naturally, his stubborn mind was set. Two months later and there we were, our feet making dulled sounds on the hardwood floors of the building that we’d grow to call ‘home’, arguing about kitchen appliances.

But indeed, I was no stranger to this odd building. When Sherlock’s family had still congregated on a regular basis, I had been invited down more times than I could count. Christmases, birthdays, garden parties; we both had many memories under that one roof. In all honesty, I was concerned at first that inhabiting a space which clearly meant so much to him, or even redecorating it differently to how it had been before would upset him, though he wouldn’t show it. I did venture to ask it after our initial viewing of the house.

“Yes, a lot of things have happened here. But a lot of things are going to happen here. It’s just a building, John. A building that we’re going to fill with our own happenings and, while they won’t override the old ones, they’ll take precedence for me. The now is more important.” He flashed a sly grin at me and swept away, his dressing gown trailing carelessly off his bare shoulder. 

So it was settled. We moved into the house in late August, the heat rolling off the coast in pleasant waves. Your lungs open up more here, breathe in the world. I can still feel it now, sitting here in the late evening sunlight which is just beginning to sink into something darker, a more sultry orange than daylight. We took a few things from baker street: the Edwardian desk usually swamped in essays and essays of Sherlock’s illegible (if elegant) scrawl, the singular bedside table that wasn’t nearly white from Sherlock’s liberal application of hydrogen peroxide four years earlier or missing a leg, our dual wardrobe and the skull, of course. Always the skull. Everything else we left. At the time, it felt like a breath of fresh air, to leave so much of ourselves behind us, but now I mourn horribly for the mismatched cupboard handles in the kitchen we acquired over all of the years or the literally threadbare rug in front of the fire. Sherlock’s chair, even. I mourn that. 

Regardless, we arrived with nearly nothing, as new men might. Ready to sew our new selves into the walls. 

“My bees! John, my bees would be perfect here!” He sprung towards me like a child. I can remember the excitement his eyes were lit by in a similar fashion to how one remembers sunsets; picturing their beauty and hyperbolizing the moment in ones mind so that it forever remains striking and glorious.

“You’re telling me you didn’t already have the exact spot planned for the hives down to a centimeter? Sherlock Holmes, you’re getting sloppy.” I only grinned at him, and it was enough.

We stayed like this for a while, wandering from room to room and planning a fuller space, with us at the heart of it. It was good. 

The kitchen seemed odd with nothing in it; the heart of the Holmes household reduced to nothing more than a hollow space. And yet somehow comforting in the sense that this space, this new and bare canvas of a space, was now ours to rewrite as completely as we wanted.

“A dishwasher. We’ll need to get a dishwasher.” Sherlock motioned somewhat vaguely behind him before launching himself into the middle of the floor. “And here- here let’s put an island (we won’t need a table, naturally, because we have a dining room now entirely for that purpose, how liberating, John!). An island where I can hang a light above it so I can see and maybe even some small drawers to keep my slides - oh, how excellent, there’s a plug socket right here for the microscope - and we--”

“Sherlock,” I turned to him as stoically as I could muster, barely holding down my smile of continued amazement at how this man - retired, for god’s sake - could have such seemingly limitless energy. I could hardly keep up. I felt a twinge for his fallen expression at the tone of my voice, but continued the charade. “You must consider: Where on earth am I going to put the microwave at this rate?”

The left corner of his mouth flicked upwards slightly and I could feel the warmth behind the affection of his gaze.

There were some initial issues regarding the placement of the bedrooms, squabbles which I look back upon with fondness now, and whether we should have taken the ensuite or not.

“But look out of the window, Sherlock,” I remember becoming increasingly exasperated. “The view; look at it. We’re in the Sussex Downs for Christ’s sake, let’s at least enjoy it.”

“But this one,” Sherlock’s head had popped out of a doorway further down the corridor, meeting my eyes. “Unless it has completely escaped your notice, is significantly bigger.”

“Why is that even a considering factor?” I had yelled back.

“Bigger bed!” He winked at me as his head disappeared again.

After we had exhausted the possibilities of every room, we ended up standing in the bay window downstairs. By this time, the sun was hanging low, filtering through the worn curtains like honey. “These are our evening hours,” I remember thinking to myself, looking out at the untamed grass outside fluttering slightly, painted golden in the dying light.

But for all of this moment’s golden transcendence, it was, do remember, the beginning of the end.


	3. December, 2029

The most prominent memory I have of our first Christmas in the house is the warmth. The heat from the fire sheltering us from the biting greyness outside - of course, of course that - yet more strikingly, the warmth sitting like a gratifying weight somewhere lost in my chest.

Distinctly, I remember one particular afternoon late, late into Advent. I don’t know exactly why this day more than any other has scored itself into my mind, but I can recall it with immediate and distinct clarity. I think, perhaps, that it’s because I was so placidly, charmingly, wholly happy. Content.

We were padded in on most sides by an extraordinary wall of cushions, like an embrace within an embrace. Sherlock’s head was nestled in my lap, half of his impossible form stretched over my feet, which were curled up beside me. By all rights, it should have been awkward and uncomfortable but we fit like we did in every essence of life: simply and yet, in the sinews - the invisible sinews - of thoughts intertwined between our bodies, we were horridly, beautifully complex.

His hair, my hands. It was soft in the places where my fingers meet. If I close my eyes hard enough, loud enough, I can make myself almost certain that I can still feel it tickling slightly. Like an itch I will never be able to scratch. So we were sitting there, impossibly and infinitely entwined, watching something mundane on the television. Or at least, I was watching something mundane. Sherlock had complained when I had refused to change the channels - more out of petulance than an actual interest in the program - until I’d run my blunt fingernails down one side of his scalp and his eyes had slid to half mast. Another and they were barely open until, on the third pass of my hand, they fluttered shut.

It wasn’t long after that I let the gentle hum of the distant, electronic voices fade into an almost-music as I watched his face. I knew he wasn’t asleep and he knew I was watching his face, so vulnerable and deceptively young when relaxed, like nothing had hardly happened to either of us at all. New men; that’s what we saw ourselves as then. I kept one hand stubbornly fixed on his skull, moving less like a hand and more like how the sea breathes sometimes, when it’s seen the sun and is wiped clean by the navy-swathed arrival of the moon. I suppose some part of me believed that my hand was holding him, his everything - because it was, under the hair and the bone it truly was his everything - like a shield might hold another rib in place for ten extra minutes or how the atmosphere forever hanging (like a version of a forever) over us, making sure nothing ever escapes. In that moment, I realised that I wanted to learn and relearn every single passage of his mind, complex or otherwise, and to walk the hallways of his thinking in a place where time doesn’t exactly exist in the conventional way. That hand - my right hand - with it, I began to walk.

My left palm moved to curl around the side of his cheek, and when our skin initially made contact I noticed his eyelids flutter ever so slightly, as if blinking into a state of alertness under the dark. They stilled, though (as everything is wont to do), and I continued burning the map of his face into my memory, as I had done so many times before. I traced the contours of his eye sockets running into the bone of his brow, so uncreased and gentle. Every hollow of his face was accentuated by the fire, which I always imagine holds the secret to a magic trick; sullying the room while it performs the exact same process at the exact same time, only this time to purify it. In this strange, somehow unnatural-natural light, in this contradiction he seemed wholly unreal, like it was dangerous for me to be touching such an empyreal, celestial creature. To me, in this wash of orange and shadow, his mind was older than the stars.

If I had chosen to glance to the window, beyond the glass, I might have noted that the air outside was thick with something not quite all there yet, the hint of the somethings of could-bes lingering, like a sharp taste wallowing at the back of ones tongue after the scent of a harsh and dead, once-living thing. The weather was balancing on that indefinable precipice between the throbbing, insistent pressure of coldness and the inevitable moth-coloured fusillade of pent-up grimness that would bring with it the snow. It didn’t snow in time for Christmas, not that year, but the long and winter-grieved meadows bore a constant blanket of frost, as if someone had draped carefully sewn spider’s webs over our entire world.

We remained like that for an indefinite time, oblivious to the crisp chill raging somewhat mutedly outside. Holding one another with our voices without saying a single word. Flickering in and out of the real spaces and the dimness wallowing in the shade; flickering in and out in tandem with the firelight.

Christmas itself was significantly more lively, and Sherlock became increasingly exasperated by the mere mention of decorations. Mostly because, I think, he was humiliatingly defeated by them.

“John!” He had bellowed across the house to me. “John! These lights won’t stay up. They’re useless. They- they just won’t- this is pointless!”

“Use more tape!” I had supplied cheerfully, whilst winding another set of lights around the banister on the stairs.

“I _have_ used more tape, I--” I remember the distinct sound of one particular detective entangled in fairy lights, crashing rather unceremoniously to the floorboards, remarkably clearly. It was only a few moments later that he had appeared at the bottom of the stairs, looking significantly more dishevelled that he had done ten minutes previously. “I don’t understand the tradition of making everything glow in the (somewhat inappropriately named) festivities. I don’t understand why the house has to look ‘nice’. You look nice. You think I look nice. It’s Christmas Day; let’s be properly and truly festive. Let’s have sex. Be merry, and all that. Jesus died for this, you know, after all.”

“Jesus didn’t--” I didn’t particularly want to argue the most basic beliefs of Christianity at that exact point in time. We’d had that debate before. “Listen, I’ll do the lights. It’s okay, it’s okay; I’ve had more practise. You could, uh,” Light the fire? I’d have to be insane. Make the mulled wine? We’d either all be horrifically drunk or horrifically sober. “Check the timer on the oven?”

He had glared slightly but he knew I could see the soft edges around his mouth, his eyes. There was one rebellious curl jutting out at an impossible angle, gone awry, rebelling. The yellow wash from the lights gave him an almost-halo: the universe’s most disobedient angel. I wanted to touch his hair.

He turned to stride purposefully away but just before he tore his eyes from mine, he hesitated, stopped with one palm holding him steady against the doorframe. “You’re aroused.” He had pointed out.

“Yes.” Well, I could hardly disagree.

“Why?” His eyebrows had creased somewhere in the middle. One paragraph in the books and books of Sherlock that I had learned to read: this was genuine confusion. “I haven’t done anything particularly arousing.”

“You. Just you. You are. I want to eat you whole, breathe you in without stopping for air. That’s all. After so long I would have thought you’d understand.” I bit my lip, before breathing out, “I love you.”

He smiled and it was an honest and bona fide smile. The kind of smiles reserved only for me. We didn’t say it very much, you see. We didn’t say it very much.

Later, with Mycroft and Molly and Greg and Greg’s daughter, Beth, all chatting amiably at our dining table, Sherlock had peered over my shoulder only to sniff haughtily at the turkey. “I don’t understand why we have to do this, either. I don’t even like turkey very much.”

“Tradition, Sherlock.” He had stepped away slightly so I could lift the dish out of the oven, armed with oven gloves. When I’d put it down he had pressed the entire length of himself against my back.

“It’s not, actually, tradition.” He’d said, staring at the cranberry sauce. “It’s more traditional to have goose.”

“It is, _actually_ , tradition, Sherlock.” I’d turned in his arms. “Just a more recent one, that’s all.”

After that he had merely sighed distractedly into my mouth, drew me closer to him. It was only when we heard Greg laughing nervously in the kitchen doorway that we pulled apart sheepishly, his hand still curled possessively around my hip.

I don’t honestly recall much of the day after that, nor the evening. We had both agreed that, to each other, the future and the house and ourselves were the only presents we really wanted, and the move had kept us so occupied that we’d both forgotten about gifts until the night before, anyway. During dinner we talked as old friends tend to talk at Christmas, reminiscing Decembers gone past and recalling the moments everyone lived through with younger bones.

All I truly remember is laughing and watching Sherlock laugh; dim firelight and a soft hum of whiteness from the tree framing his face; sinking into the sofas which devoured him in only the best possible way; looking very small and very alive. I rarely found myself happier. I rarely do.

We said goodbye to our friends as they stepped into taxis or behind the tinted glass of faceless cars, one by one. They left, everyone left, grinning and smiling through their farewells, lit upwards from the inside out. Until, of course, it was just us. Just us and the big house with all of it’s empty rooms, just us making it seem somehow even fuller than it had been before.

Sherlock had walked me backwards down the hallway, guiding me with his hands nestled on my back, his mouth nearly singing with kisses on mine. Pressing me back into the kitchen cupboards, he had murmured, “Merry Christmas, John.” And it was funny only because he had made me forget, in short minutes, that it was even Christmas at all.

He had kissed me strong and slowly - with a certain intensity yet without the furious speed that enthusiasm usually incited in him - drawing my body close to his body so that we moved like water, like we didn’t have edges between us at all. An indefinite time later he’d led us into bed, warm and our bellies pleasantly full. We savoured the moments of that night, like we weren’t in a rush. Like we had the rest of our lives.


	4. October, 2030

Life was uneventful but good.

In the June of 2030, we had bought a dog (whom Sherlock was insistent that we name ‘Gladstone’, for some unknown reason), and it was one day in October that we decided to take him to the coast. It wasn’t far from us, you see, and the poor dog had never laid eyes on the ocean. It’s not that we didn’t walk often - of course, most days we went through the fields where sometimes pockets of silence would hit you like a physical force and it’s all I could do not to crave London again, or sometimes we’d lose him on purpose in a meadow where the grass was too high and we’d pretend not to be able to find him, a chase of sorts, ending with Sherlock crashing his mouth into mine as we tumbled to the earth, seemingly drowning under all the grasses - but this one particular outing has nestled itself in my memory, grown roots that I just can’t seem to be able to shake. So I’ll write it down as I write everything down, no doubt with airs of romanticism, but documenting everything nonetheless. I don’t know why. Only I am going to read this, and I’m the only one with the weathered memory, but it seems important to record these things, somehow. Like I’d lose them if I didn’t.

So yes, October. I think the outing must have been spontaneously arranged because we didn’t arrive on the little, isolated beach until fairly late in the day. It was cold, bitingly cold, but I had insisted that we both wrap up and it was okay, the temperature was fine. I was warm enough in my own skin, after all. 

We must have stopped, pulled up the car, opened the doors to receive that initial shock of blustering air that tends to greet everyone near the sea in Autumn, set our feet on the ground. We must have done all of the conventional things one does upon arrival of most places, but I don’t remember it. I don’t even recall if it was Sherlock or myself driving. Probably Sherlock, come to think of it. No, all I remember is the colour of the sea set against the sky, the gradients of an ever-changing dye merging into one fine strip across our horizon, a chromatism that was like an oil spill in its lights and darks, except with only grey. 

I remember the sloping dune, rolling carefully onto the sands and dotted sparsely with sharp plants, the sensation of damp and cold sand stinging the skin on my face. I can remember the shape of it, but I can’t remember walking down it, called by the crashing of the smaller waves rather than the bigger ones. What I do remember, however, is walking across the beach - forwards, always forwards - with our wellies sinking ever so slightly into the sand where small rivulets of water sprinted to the ocean under the ground. We were so small then, standing just on the precipice of everything, watching the moon play games with the water.

Partway along Sherlock grabbed my hand, complained it was cold and proceeded to stuff it into his pocket, my palm pressed against his. He was right - always, naturally - and his pocket was warm so I stayed. 

We came to a halt somewhere after the sand dunes and somewhere before the water; a borderless place with no definition other than the meagreness of ‘middle’. I didn’t feel like I was in the middle, I didn’t feel lost in a place - a limbo place - where there was no clarification of edges and where the tide, the unpredictable and capricious tide, was the only constant. No, I felt like I was where the home of me was, where my walls - definite and outlined against a grey sky - were condensed and squashed so much that they could contain only one insignificant pocket and two insignificant hands. 

Because that’s ultimately what we were, what we all are without the general togetherness of things: pieces of people joining and threading themselves amongst each other to make something whole. And then the tide comes in, washes it all away again, forces us to restart the process anew.

I stood there, watching the dog tear up the untouched sand so jubilantly, so carelessly, as if it can be a good thing to make the first marks on something cleaner than it was before. I suppose, in a way, it is. I watched as seaspray was flung over his muzzle, as if the ocean were throwing fistfulls of the stuff - either in warning or celebration, I’m not entirely certain which - as he danced unchoreographed melodies into the waves. 

I’m not sure whether Sherlock was looking at the dog or the many tangled limbs of the flat, flat sea or the sky brimming with the barest hints of the sinking light of day, but he stood there with me all the same, looking at something, silent. If someone had happened to see us from a distance we perhaps would have looked intimate, sharing one of many impossible moments between the cold air, our thoughts and our eyes and our kisses - perhaps this hypothetical stranger would think we exchanged kisses, the water and our mouths as our only audience - saying more than we could in English, with it being so limited. But I think these kind of moments were, in actuality, the times when I felt the least intimately towards him; pressed together and sheltered in his pocket while our minds followed very different paths of sunken and messy pawprints scored into a thin expanse of beach or instead, the light catching the very outside corners of the sea like there were sunken chandeliers lurking just below the air, so far from our usual point of harmonious tandem that it was almost liberating.

Don’t get me wrong: I adored every second I spent with that man, pure adoration that went further than love and beyond into a stretch of palpitations and colours filling up every space in the marrow of my bones. But these moments of- well, freedom, were the moments in which, within myself, I felt incredibly alive and incredibly untethered to anything or anyone or even my own body. Just thoughts not following one definite path, traversing and fluttering into existence along every direction possible. And I shared them with him. I did. He was there beside me, his consciousness so far and so differently mapped than mine, but my hand was in his pocket, wrapped in his hand, I was wrapped in his hand, wrapped in him, and we were exquisitely aerial. Together, separate; what did it matter? Our eyes were pointed in the same direction and the dog ran across the sand.

We both stood there, facing towards the turbulent waters, for what seemed like the longest time. I can’t remember us saying anything and if we did, it wasn’t much. I think we were always somehow more content in our silences than we were in our speech. 

For some reason, we never went back to that beach. Perhaps we should, sometime. I have no memory of us climbing the dunes to leave, getting into the car, driving home. We must have done all those things - we must have left - but it seems irrelevant that we did. I think some small part of me, stuck to the bottom of my shoe and washed away with the tide, perhaps, is still there. I think some small part of me never really left at all.


	5. 2031, March

The following March was definitely warmer but, looking back, I can’t help but see everything become bluer and icier as my memories speed far too quickly into the present tense.

One occasion sticks in my mind, for some inexplicable reason. Perhaps it’s because the threads of it are intertwined with golden light; everything awash with honey and sun.

“John,” Sherlock had called from living room, his pressing boredom instantly apparent. It was inevitable of course - as I had predicted it would be - what with the retirement. But I suppose, to his credit, the patches of frustrating ennui became more infrequent as time wore down us both. “John, I’m horrendously, insatiably--”

“Bored, yes. I know. I can tell.” I had walked through at this point, forgetting to watch my feet as they strode across the sanded floorboards between the kitchen. Heavy footsteps have never seemed so light.

“Sherlock,” I had called back as I walked. “You’re the one who wanted to retire, remember?” We really should have made an effort to have more conversations face-to-face, come to think of it.

He’d sighed as I walked in the room, lounging back on the couch with his feet hanging over one end, a hand melodramatically slung over his eyes. “I realise that, John. I realise that, but this whole early retirement lark initially promised endless hours and hours of a bed with you in it.” He had sighed again. “You’re not in bed, the bees are too far away for me to reach - because at this point in time I absolutely refuse to remove myself from this sofa - and you’re not in bed. As you can see, absolutely nothing is going to plan.”

When he’d seen my reaction, his face had flickered somewhat. “This isn’t funny. John.” The impending chuckles had broken out from behind my smile, unbidden. “Not. Funny. You, standing there with all your clothes on with quite evidently no ability to contemplate the level of mental anguish I have reached whatsoever. This isn’t a laughing matter. Stop it.”

Our eyes had met then, and I remember the feeling of mine becoming impossibly softer under his. “You could have just asked, you know.”

I’d caught a glimpse of the genuine smile, if only for a second. “I am asking, John.” He had glanced at me again, fire in his eyes. “John Watson, my lover, my only, my heart, will you please - for the love of all that is holy - have your way with me _right this instant._ ”

Well. How could anyone refuse that?

I had approached him slowly. “You say you want me in a bed, is that right?”

“It’s preferable.”

“I’m terribly sorry to disappoint you then, but I am firmly of the belief that the bed is far too ambitious a destination as of the current moment.”

His lips had parted to breathe out a silent, “Oh,” and I imagined I could taste it.

I had leant over him then, placing one knee between his spread thighs. After easing myself down - slowly, slowly; I was going to take my time - I’d breathed hard and hot into his left ear, “I should probably make myself explicit: I am going to fuck you. Right. Here.”

He had swallowed and made some sort of noise under me, rubbing himself against my leg. I always loved this, being completely in control of such a wild and powerful man. He was more strong-willed than the ocean and I could reduce him to nothing more than frantic sounds and animalistic writhing.

Sherlock had batted uselessly at the buttons on my shirt before I had travelled the distance between our mouths, running my teeth over his bottom lip and beginning the slow and heady exploration of his tongue (one particular journey which could never grow dull). Then his hands had clenched into fists around the material on my front, my back, holding me in place and drawing me forever closer to him. He was hot under me, even through the layers between us.

“Naked,” He had gritted out the command as he’d pulled away before moving towards me again, but I held back.

“No way. Not so fast.” I’d kissed the corner of his mouth, the line of his jaw. “You asked for this. My rules.” I had been determined to ensure he was so-very-not-bored for the longest period of time possible.

I pulled both of his wrists above his head, held them down with my body weight against the arm of the couch. His neck, I think, was my favourite part of him. Lithe and sculpted; the marble column supporting the most important part of all. I kissed it then, moving my mouth down it softly until I reached the base of it where I bit a harsh mark into the flesh, surprising him. He had gasped and arched in one fluid motion, his eyes had shuttered closed against the light.

At this point, I’d moved back up again to smash my lips into his, to breathe roughly into his mouth, against his tongue, to leave him reeling. I remember now, I wanted him undone. Running my free hand down his chest, I had plucked at the T-shirt twisted carelessly across his body. “You do know you have your own pyjamas, right?” I had pulled back slightly but the line of his eyes never left my mouth.

“Dull,” He had exhaled before curving his spine off the cushions so his torso pressed starkly against mine.

“I like them better on you, anyway,” I’d murmured before running my hand down and underneath the offending article, merely holding his stomach with my thumb dipping into his belly button, enjoying the heat of him.

There wasn’t much space on the sofa but we managed to arrange ourselves all the same. Soon I had removed both our shirts and his pyjama bottoms, before I’d guided his arms back up over his head and held him down again.

Then I had dipped my head, brushed my tongue lightly over the bud of his left nipple and - with my free hand - held his right one between my finger and thumb, rolling it slowly. After a while of this I’d suddenly pressed my tongue down flat, making him jolt as I drew my teeth forward to bite at the flesh, grazing it.

He had shouted a broken sound of my name as I felt the tendons in his wrist grow taught while his fingers grasped at nothing at all. I’d repeated the motion, once, twice. Then he’d reached up with his hips to grind against me; even with the material of his underwear and the denim of my jeans between us, I could still feel the heat of him.

His head was thrown back, illustrating the blossom of colour creeping up from his chest and wrapping its tendrils around the base of his throat, and his eyes were screwed tightly closed while his mouth hung limply open, panting. I loved to watch his chest heave like this. I drew my crotch against his again - slowly, slowly - relishing how he writhed and keened under me. I closed the small distance again, only this time to roughly breathe into his mouth, against his tongue, as I slid one hand under the waistband of his underwear to stroke him gently, occasionally brushing my thumb over the head.

He had panted, “Jeans, your. Jeans.” And, finding myself trapped between the grip of his thighs, I could do nothing more than unbutton and unzip myself, noting absently that the friction of my zipper would probably rub his skin raw.

Holding us both in one fist with Sherlock’s heel digging into my lower back, I had murmured, “Is this okay?” He had only been able to nod frantically so I begun to rock forwards, backwards, forwards.

We had remained like that for some time, the slow burn of something growing taught between us as my hand unfaltering maintained an almost agonisingly slow pace and as he had gasped and twisted and arched under me. The intimacy would have been lost on anyone who wasn’t us.

With no other warning, his eyes had shot open to meet mine and his back became ramrod straight as he came. Just watching him get lost within himself nearly undid me entirely. Then, with softly whispered syllables lost to his gaze and his body still undulating slightly under me, I was toppled off the edge alongside him as I bit roughly into the flesh on his throat. I came back to myself moment later, breathing hard into column of neck having collapsed my chest onto his.

After a while he had twisted his hands from my loose grip before running one through my hair, rasping his nails gently over my scalp. “You know, we missed a trick here.”

“Mm?” I had rolled us over so we lay side by side on the sofa cushions, planted a slight peck of a kiss on the end of his nose.

“Mm,” He’d twisted slightly to produce something from behind his back. “I hid lube down the back of the cushions, you see. You know, in case of emergency.”

I had laughed then, wrapping my arms around his body and drawing him close to me. “Keep it there,” I had said. “You never know. It might still prove to be a quite handy spot.”

We had remained there for longer than I can remember, just basking in the scent of ourselves and the lazy sound of the birds outside. For that moment, content.


	6. Chapter 6

Of course, the picture of domestic bliss that I’m painting is far from accurate. Especially not with one Sherlock Holmes constituting half of our relationship and a short-tempered army doctor making up the other 50%.

It was in July of the same year that I had opened the fridge, only to find - to my abject horror on account of Sherlock’s absolute oath that he would oh-so-definitely-not-be-ever-touching-dead-things-again - exactly one head, three fingers from three different left hands, one third of a tongue and fourteen-point-five toenails. Oh, and at the back I discovered a (very poorly hidden) liver some three days later. I had notably, until this exact moment in time, been pleasantly surprised with Sherlock’s adherence to this particular promise and had enjoyed immensely consuming, say, some mango chutney left over from the Indian the night before without being in fear of my life.

“Sherlock!” I had called out. The silence that met me was more than telling. “For exactly how long have you been keeping dead people in our fridge?”

“Not dead people, per se,” His voice had been muffled slightly and I’d followed it out of the open French windows into the garden. I’d found him lying flat on his back, precisely in the middle of the lawn. “Only parts of dead people.” A pause. “And a meagre two days, if you must know the exact figure.”

I had stood on his left side as his eyes swept past me to focus on the blue above us. “Yes, I must know the exact figure, Sherlock. God only knows what I’ve eaten--”

“You seem the image of perfect health to me.” He had glanced over at me then, for the first time since I had come outside. I watched my shadow loom over his belly. “Anyway, we’ve had this argument a thousand times before.”

“Yes. Yes we have. No times of which, however, were we discussing this particular fridge in this particular house during this particular retirement. You promised--”

“No need to shout, John. I never promise. You know this.”

I’d given time to collect myself. “Alright, then. You _said_ , you told me, you gave me your word, whatever you like. Pedantic git. Did it never occur to you that by introducing certain parts of certain individuals (who no doubt all met their ends in more-than-suspicious circumstances, I might add) into our fridge not only contaminates your food and endangers your health, but also mine?”

“Yes.”

There was something that happened to me which cannot be expressed articulately when Sherlock entered these odd moods, something which started in my fingertips and made the air slowly turn a red sort of colour.

I wet my lower lip. “Sorry?” My eyebrows had stretched so far into my hairline at this point that I doubt they were visible. On other days, this incident wouldn’t have bothered me in the slightest. Sometimes though, I couldn’t help but feel like we were destined to clash, angrily and repetitively, until we were either forcibly pulled apart or we destroyed one another.

“Yes, that did occur to me.”

“Right. I see. So tell me, what exactly did you _deduce_?”

“Well frankly, John, that couldn’t give a damn.” He’d rolled over to plant his face again the grass and groan loudly. “I don’t see why this is such a problem: we buy uncooked meat all the time. You’ve seen more dead human beings than most. You love me. The fridge is the most convenient place for that liver and I know how much you’d hate to have fruit flies.”

He’d continued to complain into our lawn as I had exhaled violently at the horizon. I decided not to verbally (and somewhat incredulously) add the recent development of the liver onto my ever-growing list of items-I-wish-I-didn’t-know-were-in-our-fridge, nor to point out to the detective that fruit flies tended to prefer fruit. Meanwhile, the horizon didn’t appear to flinch.

When he’d rolled back again, after gulping in a significant amount of air, he had glared at me and gritted out, “Why do you even bother? Why are you still here at all if you’re so fed up with me all the time? You can’t change me. You never have been able to change me, no matter how damn hard you’ve tried over the years. Stop standing over me, looking at me like that. If you’d rather not be around me at all, then why not leave now? Save us both all the trouble, hm?”

The words cut but I knew he was fishing. Fishing for me to turn around to embrace him and forgive him. Fishing for me to stroke his ego. His idea of an apology was manipulating me to do all the apologising. This time, I didn’t oblige him.

“Fine.” I’d looked him dead in the eye before turning towards the garden gate, stepping through and shutting it behind me without glancing back. I had continued marching in a straight line for quite a while, over the golden crest of the hill and into the sun.

The further I’d walked, the more the purple hue enveloping my veins dissipated until, eventually, I was left with a sort of hollow feeling, like I had burned all of my insides up. The colour fell off my skin in waves. I began to think about my age, about both our ages. Sherlock was younger than me, but not by much. Three short years. I thought about dying a lot, on that hill. About which one of us would die first. About how much time we had left as a solid unit. We needed to stop tearing the walls of Us down because it would take days upon days to build ourselves back up again. We didn’t have the time for all the petty fighting. I didn’t have the time to find so much fault in so much of him; we’d already had those years.

It’s not that the future looked grim, not exactly. I was quite content for both of ourselves to end slowly, quietly. I imagined we’d die together, facing away from the evening summer sunlight and watching our shadows turn to dust.

At the top of the rise there’s this ancient oak tree. I had passed it, trailing my fingers across the ugly surface of the trunk, thinking about age. Thinking that even this would end. I’d put both my hands behind my back and swore to myself that the next time I was up here, I’d be holding his hand instead. And so my memory leaves me. My feet had bravely insisted, “Forwards,” and onwards indeed I had marched into the low glare of the evening, too scared to turn around and to find my shadow disintegrating already, getting lost on the wind.


End file.
